Note on Excerpt: 

“Quarantine” is an excerpt from Violent Offender, a memoir that narrates the author’s first and only experience with incarceration. Told through the lens of a queer, educated Black man, Violent Offender explores themes of guilt, forgiveness, and connection as the author tries to navigate and find a place in a frightening new world. The memoir covers the twenty-two months the author spent inside, tracing his journey from lonely addict to inmate peer mentor and beyond.

*content warning: references to suicide, sexual violence

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They came for me on a Friday.

“Welcome to MacDougall,” said a female officer, tall and blonde, with sleeves of tattoos covering both arms and a bright, wide smile. “Have you ever been here before?”

I shook my head no, resisting the urge to blab about how I’d never been to prison before, that it was my first time in trouble, that I had a master’s degree for fuck’s sake. I resisted telling her I was scared. She escorted us through the cell blocks before we stopped at the one meant to be my home for the next ten days. 

During the pandemic, the Department of Corrections had transformed several blocks of MacDougall, a maximum-security prison, into a quarantine wing. Here they housed people who’d committed the most heinous of crimes, the people with long sentences, and high-risk levels.

A nurse took our vitals while the CO explained how things worked in the COVID block. There were two floors of cells called tiers. 

“Showers every other day. Same goes for laundry. Phones around nine each morning and around four each afternoon. Use that time to get hot water, as well. Any questions?”

No questions.

“All right. You’ll stay in cell thirty-one.”

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I unpacked the clear plastic bag holding my belongings: A few packs of ramen noodles, a cup, some notepads, and my book—a treatise about Illuminati conspiracy theories. My new cellmate asked to use the phone and grab water. As soon as he left, the urge to evacuate my bowels came with a vengeance that couldn’t be stopped.

I asked the CO to close the door and got down to business. I did what I needed to do and felt immeasurably better. After that I wanted to pass out, ready to waste the ten-day quarantine away.

“What the fuck?”

Standing in the doorway, my cellie, whose name I hadn’t yet learned, stared me down.

“You fucking blew this shit up, nigga.” He fanned the air in front of his nose and scrunched his face up like a fist. “Fuck, this shit stinks. You don’t courtesy flush? The fuck?”

He must have seen my confusion and terror.

“You ever been in a cell before?”

I shook my head.

“Locked up at all before?”

Another shake of my head.

“As soon as that shit hits the water,” he explained, “you flush. You just keep hitting that shit. Sucks the smell down the toilet before it can stink up the cell.”

Jay, with his long dark brown hair in six cornrows down his back, solid body, almost black eyes, and bulbous, crooked nose, taught me the basics of cell etiquette. As he explained, he set up the privacy curtain—one of my two sheets, of course—to hang up when one of us needed to dump off. After his haranguing, however, I had decided I was going to hold my shit until I left (a task I managed to accomplish). For pissing, Jay said, just stand back-to. The flushing trick worked just as well with passing gas, and he expected me to use it.

He spoke in an aggressive tone, seemingly unaware of how belligerent he sounded.

That night Jay interrogated me until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Where was I from? How long had I been down? What prisons had I been to? He told me his theory that DOC received a bunch of money for each positive COVID result and so doctored the results to make it appear as though more people were positive than was true and asked what I thought. It’s possible, I reasoned.

Annoyed and ready for bed, I thought, I hit the cellmate lottery with this one. Is this really what I deserve? And that voice from deep in my head, or maybe from the cell walls, replied. Yes, it said, and you know this.‍

When my answers came slower and clipped shorter, he said, “Sorry, I’m asking so many questions. I’m just trying to get to know you.”

Each morning around seven the medical staff woke us for vitals and meds. Inmates with janitor jobs delivered all three meals in Styrofoam trays. I barely ate. I was too depressed. Due to the nature of our stay, we remained in the cell for twenty-three hours a day.

“Yo! Take a shower.” It wasn’t a suggestion; it was a demand Jay made on our first morning together when the prison let us out for showers or phones. And I obeyed, primarily out of fear that he might become angry and scream at me again. After I bathed, he said, “You fucking stank, nigga.”

Oh.

Jay had a TV, a plastic thirteen-inch clear television with the speakers removed so it could only be heard through headphones. Luckily Jay had headphones—the expensive Skullcandy ones—and if he blasted the volume, I could hear the TV clearly. He invited me down from the top bunk Saturday afternoon to watch a movie on one of the channels controlled by staff. They brought in movies and TV shows, Jay explained, whether it was DVD, Netflix, or USB drive, and played them on repeat until someone changed the selections. Sometimes the movies skipped at the same parts, started over, then skipped at the same part again until it was changed in a day or two.

While watching The Lost City starring Sandy Bullock and Channing Tatum, Jay offered up unrequested information about his prison life and what brought him to prison. Jay, I learned, was serving seven years for manslaughter.

“I beat a murder charge, dawg,” he said, not exactly smiling, but the ghost of one flitted across his lips and his eyes flashed dark for a second. “But I did that shit, though. Nigga attacked me first.”

That admission caught my attention, and Jay took notice.

“Yeah, man. Me and my girl—tiny, bad little thing, she held me down a few years when I started my bid—we was at a bar up in Hartford. Chillin’, vibin’. And this nigga comes and tries talking to my bitch, bro. I was right there.

“So, I step up, push him aside, and say, ‘That’s my girl, bro, hop off.’ He just looks at me mad dumb like all of a sudden he don’t know English. I said that shit in Spanish for the nigga, too. I was pissed, bro. Yelling and shit. I got a temper.” He chuckled. “His friends had come around. He looked real mad, but they pulled him away. Nigga was a bitch, bro.

“Anyway, a few weeks later, he comes up behind me—guess he was embarrassed or some shit—and my girl is like ‘Bae, watch out!’ and I move in time. This faggot had a knife—she seen the metal flash just before he could use it. But I took him down, got on top of him, pulled my blade out. I traced his chest—” he made the motion with his hand “—and plunged it in. I wiped that shit off on his shirt and ran.”

He told me his story with a sadistic joy, too, like he was proud of what happened. Hiding my terror became my priority as I squirmed in the plastic chair next to his bed. I didn’t want to do anything to risk pissing him off like shitting or farting or looking at him wrong or breathing. 

Out of perceived fear, or maybe even partly out of kinship, I offered up to Jay less vague information about why I was in prison. Our charges, I explained, were similar except my manslaughter charge came with the caveat: with a motor vehicle while intoxicated. It had been early in the morning and I hit someone who had been out for a walk. My car eventually hit a church downtown, and the police pulled me, barely conscious, from the vehicle. That’s what the police told me—no details about who he was and no information about his condition. About a month later, I found out the man was in his late twenties, around the same age I was when my life collided with his death.

I explained how my friend had been going through a rough time, had turned to drugs, and slipped them into his own drink at a birthday party. Having had my fair share of social interaction for the night, I offered my friend a ride, which he accepted, and I downed my friend’s drink. I remember driving towards home, I recalled, then blackness, and all of a sudden there were cops pulling me out of my car. I told him how I’d hoped they’d find whatever drug my friend had put in his drink in my system, but that didn’t happen. I explained how my friend promised to speak at my sentencing, admitting to what happened, but he killed himself a month before my court date.

“So you don’t even remember the accident?”

“Not at all,” I said while thinking, But it haunts me, every single day. I am not a violent person, never even been in a fight, but that man’s life is on my hands, and I can never repay that debt to his family or society or myself.

“Sorry about your friend, man.”

That evening as Jay flipped through the limited channels, the news stunned him.

“Yooooo!” he bellowed. A reporter stood outside the Hartford courthouse, reporting on whatever. Jay pointed to the side of the courthouse at a house with a tall wooden fence. “That’s where I ditched the knife, bro.”

He laughed and laughed, gripping his considerable belly until his throes of laughter died in cold, thick silence.

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I didn’t do more than urinate the entire weekend. I couldn’t risk raising Jay’s ire. I spent that Monday much like the rest of my time in quarantine: Napping, reading my Illuminati book, trying to write, and watching whatever Jay and, to a much lesser degree, I decided for the TV.

During Bad Trip, Jay began prying, and at first, I considered it genuine curiosity. We had been enjoying the movie, laughing at the stupid pranks the main characters played on unsuspecting victims. I had even, for just a moment, thought that save for not using the bathroom, this quarantine with him wouldn’t be so bad. He stuttered a bit as he spoke, betraying a hesitation I hadn’t heard when berating me about shitting in the cell. 

“So…are you…uh…gay?”

“Well…” I started, releasing a large gust of breath I didn’t even realize I was holding in. I squirmed in the plastic chair next to his bed. “Right now, I don’t really think I’m anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“As of right now, I consider myself asexual.” Confusion morphed his face, and I quickly continued: “I’m not sexually attracted to men or women.”

“Oh…I see. All right.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping that put an axe in the conversation.

About ten minutes later, Jay asked another question. We were side by side, him lying on the bottom bunk, me sitting in a chair located in the tiny space between the bunk bed’s ladder and the toilet. Despite my experience with men like him, I hadn’t seen where his questions were leading.

“When you was out there—in the world—what did you do?” he asked. 

“What do you mean?”

“You fucked with niggas or bitches? Like was you out there sucking dick?”

My tongue twisted into knots, and I tripped over my words.

“I…uh…I…”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t feel comfortable.” By then he’d sat up and sat on the edge of the bed. I looked Jay in the eyes—a huge mistake—and could see the eagerness sparkling in the brown of his irises.

Not only did I feel violated, but I felt trapped. I had dealt with peoples’ unearned sense of entitlement to details about my sex life before, but that had occurred in places that, when I felt uncomfortable, I could remove myself from, like online or restaurants. The sense of being locked in a cell with someone who’d casually admitted to taking a man’s life already induced panic. Now, this man who’d displayed his firecracker temper was asking me deeply personal questions, but I worried about what he might do if I refused.

I steeled myself. “I…did stuff with guys, girls. Depended on the situation.”

“Word.” He looked satisfied, a tiny smile on his lips.

We watched more of the movie in silence. No longer laughing aloud. The movie’s plot was interspersed with hidden-camera pranks on the unsuspecting public that moved the story along. I enjoyed the silence, happy that his line of questioning had ended, that he was no longer interested in me—

“You ever fuck around with trans people?”

Somehow, like a beacon, that question directed my mind through Jay’s misty cover of curiosity. I knew immediately where this line of questioning was headed.

“No…I mean…yes. Well, sort of.” I relayed an embarrassing story where I failed to realize an acquaintance with whom I’d gone to dinner was transitioning until our server used she/her pronouns.

His face lit up strangely, as though he thought he found some kindred spirit.

“Yo, bro, when I was in Cheshire…”

Jay told me about his experiences with transgender women. The story began with him noting how some of the women could really fool him—he made sure to call them women and use the proper pronouns—especially from behind.

“Some of them was really shaped right,” he said, making an hourglass shape with his hands.

From his descriptions of the women in Cheshire Correctional Institution, a high security prison, the story turned to his boy. Jay described his friend as the typical hood dude. Tough. Womanizer. Most importantly, straight. When Jay learned of his friend’s relationship with one of the baddest transwomen in the prison, he was shocked but not put off.

“It was weird,” he said, “but that was still my nigga, though.”

If my hunch was correct, we would arrive at Jay’s intended destination soon.

“You know,” he began, “back when I was in the world, I knew one. She was mad cool, hung out with the boys, smoked and shit.

“She was always telling me about how the niggas from our hood fucked with her heavy.She was out there turning these dudes left and right. She was mad cool, though.”

I wanted to tell him that no one could be turned, that if these men were having sex with transwomen, it was because they were either closeted, curious, or simply straight men who like transwomen. Explaining that sexuality existed on a spectrum rather than just straight and gay, however, was not on my to-do list for my first prison bid. Maybe, deep down Jay already knew this, but didn’t know how to articulate it. It wasn’t my job to help him do that. I had other, more important tasks to accomplish, the number one being learning to survive, or at least, navigating this new world.

Jay’s tone sounded almost reverential when he spoke of her, like a preacher speaking about some encounter he had with God at 2 a.m. in a burning bush. Jay reminisced, smiling and staring at the ceiling as he described his relationship with this transwoman. Jay turned his head, locked eyes with me, and said: “Ya know, she got me.”

For a moment confusion took over and Jay must have read it on my face.

“She, like, got me, bro.” His eyes pleaded with me, as though begging, Please, please, understand me so I don’t have to explain further.‍

I said, “Oh…that’s fine.” 

During a quick pause I gathered my thoughts and continued, “I know a lot of guys who have hooked up with transwomen…or other guys. There’s nothing at all wrong with it.”

I’m not sure why I felt an urge to convince him of that fact. I don’t think he was looking for validation. Perhaps I was afraid his unprocessed feelings about that taboo part of himself would manifest as anger in that small cell with the only object on the receiving end being me. Or maybe it was because a now-deceased friend had used drugs and alcohol to explore his sexuality, and what started out as genuine curiosity usually ended in shame-filled outbursts of anger. It was like a movie I didn’t remember watching until the middle, and though I didn’t like the ending, I was too invested to turn it off.

To my surprise Jay didn’t devolve into the ball of aggression I’d seen days ago. He said, “Nah, that shit was fire. At first, I was like ‘What the fuck?’ because I felt like she tricked me. But for some reason I kept going back to her. She lived close to me and them late nights…Man —” he sucked his teeth slowly “—I don’t know…those ‘You up?’ texts.”

I laughed and said one of the few things I knew to be true of life, “It be like that sometimes.”

Aside from the occasional roar of laughter from Jay, we finished the movie in silence. I can’t remember what came on after because what happened next is something I’ll never forget.

He called my name into the darkness in that inquiring tone of a curious kid, the only light coming from the TV, “…can you suck my dick?”

“Uhhhh…”

“Please,” he begged. “I been down so long. It’s been three years and I got four left to go.”

“I don’t—”

“Bro, come on. Just this once, and I’ll use this memory in the shower for the rest of my bid.”

As he pleaded, many thoughts and emotions ran circles in my mind. First up—fear. Jay’s temper and previous admission about his crime terrified me. I’d also, several years earlier, been in a sexual situation where I gave in to pressure, and when I finally got the nerve to stop and say no, the man used his strength to allow himself to finish. I did not want a sequel. Second —I was confused. How did I know where he planned to go almost from the jump and not derail the train? Did I want him to go there? Is this what I wanted him to ask for all along? I was unsure.

There was a certain danger surrounding what he was asking for, and I was attracted to danger. Sexual contact between inmates was strictly prohibited, and that, quite simply, revved my engine. The DOC, I reasoned, housed me with someone like this. If anything happened—whether it was consensual sexual activity or I got my ass beat for passing gas—it was on them, not me. If they didn’t care about my safety, neither did I. I had fucking killed someone. This is my prize for the next three years. This is everything I deserve. I had made specific choices that led me directly to this moment. I took that man away from his family and friends. Intent did not matter.

I reasoned that my life was basically over. I couldn’t kill myself, that’d be taking the easy way out. So fuck it, why not?

I gave him a blowjob. 

We waited for the CO to do a tour and used the fifteen minutes to get it over with. It ended quickly—thank God—–and he cleaned up and sat back down. 

“Thanks, bro. That felt… right.”

The rest of my time at MacDougall was spent sleeping, picking at food, and fending off subsequent requests for sexual favors. By doing it once I opened a can of worms—or one large worm, really—that I could never close. I guess that’s what I deserved for feeding a stray.

Though I learned much about cell etiquette—like the courtesy flush and not spitting in the sink when brushing your teeth—I couldn’t wait to leave MacDougall, to get away from Jay forever. I had refused to shit the whole time I was there, worried that I’d fuck up the courtesy flush and become some story people would tell for years to come. I seriously needed to take a dump.

The night before our stay ended, as I tried to sleep, I heard a familiar beckoning of my name.

“Yes?”

“If you…uhhh…wanted me to do…something…for you, I’ll do it…but you gotta keep it between us.”

“Thanks, but I’m good.”

“What, why?”

“I’m just fine right now.”

Later.

“Kashawn?”

I pretended to be asleep.

“Bruh, I hear you moving up there. Don’t ignore me, nigga. If you don’t want to talk, just say so.”

I remained silent.

Later…

I farted.

Jay whispered, “Ugh…what the fuck? A fart, really? Fuck.”

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That time spent with Jay was a learning experience. Maybe he’d planned to use intimidation to coerce me into doing what he wanted, but I refused to play victim. It wasn’t the first time someone acted as though they were entitled to my body. It was, however, the first time a sense of fear, perceived obligation, and misguided curiosity led me to do something I didn’t particularly want to do. I wouldn’t go back and change it if I could. A fucked-up part of me wanted to do something like that, and besides, I gave him something he’d never forget.

The next morning, a Saturday, after vitals and rapid COVID tests, transport took us back to the Cybulski Facility. The prison counted the ten quarantine days from the day we took the lab test, not the day we left for MacDougall. To us, it was a pleasant surprise. Jay and I sat in Admitting and Processing with a few others for about an hour before an officer escorted me into the building with a mattress and a clear garbage bag full of my belongings in hand. Jay stayed behind because he resided in the neighboring building.

We left each other with a single head nod.

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